If a process is reniced, then all its children inherit that niceness. So a PHP script can call proc_nice on itself, then invoke system(), and the command executed via system() will also be niced.
Also worth making a note of ionice. There's no PHP function for this, but it's important. A nice'd program will happily try to chew up all i/o bandwidth with very little CPU usage, it can therefore make the entire computer non-responsive despite the programmer's intention. Use "ionice -c3" or see "man ionice"
proc_nice
(PHP 5)
proc_nice — Change la priorité d'exécution du processus courant
Description
$increment
)
proc_nice() modifie la priorité du processus courant par
le paramètre spécifié increment.
Un paramètre increment positif atténuera la
priorité du processus courant, tandis qu'une valeur négative
increment augmentera la priorité.
proc_nice() n'est pas lié à proc_open() et ses fonctions associées d'aucune façon.
Liste de paramètres
-
increment -
La valeur de l'incrément de la priorité.
Valeurs de retour
Cette fonction retourne TRUE en cas de
succès ou FALSE si une erreur survient.
Si une erreur
survient, par exemple, si l'utilisateur qui tente de changer la priorité d'un processus n'a
pas suffisamment de droit pour le faire, une erreur de niveau
E_WARNING est générée et FALSE est retourné.
Notes
Note: Disponibilité
proc_nice() n'est disponible que sur les systèmes qui disposent de capacités NICE. NICE est compatible avec : SVr4, SVID EXT, AT&T, X/OPEN, BSD 4.3. Par exemple, proc_nice() n'est pas disponible sous Windows.
On a Linux system, running apache2 as a non-privileged user you can not increase the niceness of the process after decreasing it. Also, you can not use the apache_child_ terminate either. I found the following does work though:
<?php
//decrease niceness
proc_nice(19);
//kill child process to "reset" niceness
posix_kill( getmypid(), 28 );
?>
Regarding ionice - on linux the impact of the ionice -c3 class is similar to that of nice, because the CPU "niceness" is taken into account when calculating the io niceness.
Simple function for check process nice, by default returns nice of current process:
<?php
public static function getProcessNice ($pid = null) {
if (!$pid) {
$pid = getmypid ();
}
$res = `ps -p $pid -o "%p %n"`;
preg_match ('/^\s*\w+\s+\w+\s*(\d+)\s+(\d+)/m', $res, $matches);
return array ('pid' => (isset ($matches[1]) ? $matches[1] : null), 'nice' => (isset ($matches[2]) ? $matches[2] : null));
}
?>
If you don't have PHP5 and needs to nice your process this works good.
<?php
function proc_nice($priority) {
exec("renice +$priority ".getmypid());
}
//You also need a shutdown function if you don't want to leave your http deamons with a modified priority
function exit_func(){
// Restore priority
proc_nice(0);
}
register_shutdown_function('exit_func');
?>
Just an addition to the previous note re: exec('renice...'). The exit_func() will not set the priority back to normal (0) (at least on linux), unless the user that the webserver is running as is a super user (bad idea). You can decrease the priority of the running task, but not increase it again. See man page for renice.
To prevent subsequent requests running at the lower priority I called apache_child_terminate() on shutdown.
